I began group psychotherapy in the late 1980s, when other people were deciding that such Freudian-inspired projects were irredeemably flawed and that Freud himself was finished. Psychoanalysis, for Adolf Grunbaum, was a failed experiment; therapy, according to Jeffrey Masson, was abusive; Freud, according to Fredrick Crews, was hypocritical, bogus, a charlatan. Yet to my mind the prevailing critique of psychoanalysis as a form of social control struck me as insensitive to people’s search and capacity for reflective emotional literacy. And so I commenced therapy, vaguely aware that this was an interesting cultural moment to begin ‘experimenting’ with Freud. 

The therapeutic group to which I belonged followed, like most psychoanalytic groups, strict rules and procedures. We met every Thursday afternoon for ninety minutes. Sometimes the time flew, but regularly it dragged. Sometimes we’d work well together, reproducing the functional Tavistock Clinic fantasy of overcoming competition in the name of cooperation, but more often we did not. The imperative to turn up at therapy remained strong, however, such was the application of the ‘Australian psychoanalytic rule’ that a failure to show disqualified one from the Medicare benefit.